The dubl story

The idea for dubl was born during an innovation focused Design Sprint with the theme How might Recruitment Agencies provide a better service to candidates? In the customer research leading up to this Design Sprint, we’d identified a number of patterns around the way candidates and Recruitment Consultants connect. There were some real negatives from candidates’ point of view (like “as soon as I change my LinkedIn profile or upload my CV on a job board I’m bombarded with phone calls, emails and connection requests from Recruiters”), but also some very positive ones (like “I’ve found two Recruiters I really like and trust and every time I’m considering changing jobs I reach out to them first. They do most of the jobsearching for me”).

Taking these feedback patterns as inspiration, we came up with a platform (working title “Consult”) that would put candidates in control and connect them with individual Recruiters (or Agents, as we’d started calling them at this point) specialising in the type of role they were looking for. This platform would be different because it empowered the candidate to make the first move and focused on creating long-term relationships. During the early stages of testing prototypes with actual end users, both candidates and Agents, feedback was very positive and encouraged us to build a Minimum Viable Product of what by now had become “dubl”.

We had an amazing time building the MVP and then building further functionality on top of it. One of the early highlights was being featured on Product Hunt for a day which led to a large number of signups and a tonne of incredibly useful (positive and negative) feedback from users all over the world.

As time progressed and we learned more and more about how our users were engaging with dubl, it became clear that connecting the right candidates with the right Agents was much harder than we’d originally estimated. Whilst we were relatively successful in attracting new candidates and Agents, we didn’t do as well as we’d hoped in creating those successful relationships we were hoping to help our users foster.

Ultimately, without generating value for our users by helping them connect with the right candidate or Agent, we realised there was no hope for dubl as a platform users would continue to engage with and ultimately even want to pay for. That’s why we’ve now taken down the application.

Although it didn’t turn out to be as big a success as we hoped it would be, we have learned lots over the last eight months and have loved it every step of the way.